Wii will not be killed by Wii U: Nintendo

Mike Luttrell, 25th September 2012

Nintendo is pledging continued support for the Wii even after its successor hits store shelves.
As dated as it is in the 2010s, Nintendo's six-year-old platform will continue to live on, with no indication that it will start getting reduced support.

"The broad marketing for the Wii is not going to change," assured Nintend of America president Reggie Fils-Aime in a Forbes interview.

He said the company is very interested in continuing to please the "late adopter." This in spite of the fact that the Wii has no built-in hard drive, can not output in high-definition, and has an extremely limited online footprint, making it seem incredibly outdated in the current environment.

Fils-Aime, however, is focusing on the consumers who don't care about things like HD and online gaming. "There's still millions of these type of consumers available. So it's a sizable opportunity," he said.

Of course, whenever a new system comes out, companies will always say that the predecessor is still viable. They don't have any incentive to get customers to stop buying the previous platform, since adoption of a new console can take years.

The market is what will truly dictate when the Wii dies. If the Wii U takes off like gangbusters, developers are going to quickly turn their attention away from the Wii, and without that support, the Wii will fade away.

Nintendo no doubt understands that reality, but it still wants to emulate what Sony did when it successfully peddled the PS3 and PS2 for the first few years of the PS3's life. By comparison, after the Wii was released, the Gamecube was officially discontinued about nine months later.